A production server needs to have little if no down time. At the same time, however, the data on a production server is often critical to an organization and needs to be backed up frequently in case the production server loses or has its data corrupted. To alleviate this problem, data on a production server may be exported to data protection server. As the data on the production server changes, deltas corresponding to the changes may be sent to the data protection server. Periodically, the data from the production server that is stored on the data protection server may be backed up, thus avoiding down time for backups of the production server.
Restoring data from datasets created by the backups may be problematic, particularly if the data protection server loses or has its data corrupted. What is needed is a method and system for backing up and restoring data so as to minimize downtime of production servers. Ideally, such a method and system would also provide a mechanism for a system administrator or the like to restore data backed up from the data protection server either to the data protection server or directly to the production server.